"What were they, sir?"
"Give me a second. I took notes, because I had a hard time believing what was coming out of her mouth."
COL Harrison pulled his notebook out of his pocket and began. "First, she hates that you're a rural, southern, redneck who still talks like he's from northern Alabama after twenty-five years in the Army. Second, she is disturbed that you're the only non-West Point graduate in the command structure and even more disturbed that you started your career as an enlisted person and went to Officers Candidate School. Third, she finds it strange that you're the only senior officer in the division who doesn't drink alcohol or have a social life. You only drink soft drinks at military functions and never bring a date to social functions. Your primary hobby seems to be solo backpacking trips in the wilderness. For some reason, she thinks that failure to drink or to connect with a significant other is a deficiency in your ability to command. Fourth, you don't seem to give a damn about the whole DEI thing. You've been adamant about doing your reviews and promotions strictly on merit, regardless of what that does to your DEI scores. And finally, although she didn't say this, I could see it's a big factor. She hates that the troops serving under you worship the ground you walk on. She knows what they think of her and having them treat you as all but godlike is just flat pissing her off."
I had to give that some thought. General Diversity (for that was now what I was going to call her mentally, if not aloud) knew enough about me to know that I did not share many of her values. My primary, indeed, virtually my only, function as a battalion commander was to ensure that my battalion was the best trained, best equipped and best led unit it could be. I had prided myself on accomplishing more in terms of peacekeeping in our sector of Iraq on our last deployment than any of the predecessor units in that sector. And I'd done it with only a handful of casualties. Surely that had to count for something.
"Permission to speak candidly, sir," I asked.
"Certainly, Billy. You've earned the right to be completely candid with me. And let's cut this "sir" crap out. Just like when we're having dinner with Alyssa (the colonel's wife), I'm Bob and you're Billy."
"You know my background." And indeed, he did. I'd been raised by my grandparents, Pawpaw and Meemaw, after my parents' car had been totaled by a runaway logging truck, killing both of them, when I was two. Pawpaw had been a WWII vet. He'd dropped out of high school at 16, forged his parents' signatures on his enlistment paperwork, and joined the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor. During the next four years he'd seen action in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, southern France, and Germany. His best friend, a high school history teacher in civilian life, had been killed in action along the Siegfried Line. His unit had liberated one of the concentration camps. Although he never wanted to talk about the war, he had shared two things with me. The first was that he'd promised his friend that he'd keep on learning, and he had. Pawpaw was an avid reader of history, biography, and other educational non-fiction, a trait he'd passed on to me. And the second was that no one who had not seen a concentration camp at the time of it's liberation could truly understand the horrors he and his fellow soldiers had discovered.
Meemaw had been a high school classmate. She and Pawpaw had been dating when he quit school. Before leaving for basic training, he'd proposed to her. She'd promised to wait for him. She had. They'd been married within days after he returned from active service, bought the farm I was raised on, and, to my knowledge, never left Alabama again except to see me graduate from basic training and from OCS.
My mother had been a 30-year-old single woman, a spinster by the standards of her place and time, when she met my father at work. Mother had been a secretary at the local Tennessee Valley Authority office since graduating from high school. By the time she met my father, she'd become the de facto office manager, a position that the TVA would not give her officially because she lacked a college degree (and probably because she was a woman). My father had been transferred there as the new office manager when the former manager retired. He and my mother had immediately bumped heads, repeatedly. After she proved right a couple of times, he began to see the virtue of listening to her. Conversations at work had led to invitations to dinner, to more dates and finally to a proposal. They'd been married three years when I was born and had died shortly after their fifth anniversary. If my father had any living relatives at the time of his death, he'd never mentioned them. Nor had he left any record. If my mother knew of them, that knowledge died with her. In any event, no one ever came looking for my father and my parents' deaths left me in the care of my maternal grandparents.
My grandparents had lived in Franklin County, Alabama. It was thinly populated, rural, and still overwhelmingly agricultural. There was very little population movement into the county and most, if not all, of the residents spoke with a distinct southern accent as I was growing up. Because my grandparents were hard-shell Baptists, I'd been raised without alcohol, a television or seeing a movie. In fact, the first moving picture I ever saw was a film in health class in tenth grade. I'd learned to speak the way my neighbors did and had never lost the accent. Nor had I tried. I'd found it distinctive enough to be recognized instantly in combat situations, a plus, rather than a minus.
I'd enlisted in the Army as soon as I graduated high school, getting Meemaw and Pawpaw to sign off even though I was a few weeks shy of my 18
th
birthday. College was not something I could afford without the assistance of the GI Bill. I fully expected to serve my initial enlistment, leave the service, and go to college. Pawpaw's reading habits had accelerated college attendance for me in an odd way. At my first duty assignment, I'd ended up driving for the battalion commander, a job usually given to a specialist. I'd been reporting into battalion headquarters for assignment when I was dragooned by the battalion command sergeant major after the specialist who normally drove broke a leg. Because of my farm background, I could drive almost any piece of equipment. The meeting that the battalion commander was attending broke up earlier than expected and he'd found me deeply engrossed in Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror." A history major himself, he'd quizzed me on the book the entire drive back to his office. He'd then requested that I continue to drive him, monitoring my reading and continuing to discuss what I was learning. I'd been driving for him about six months when the battalion CSM called me into his office, handed me a package of papers and told me to complete them and return them to him. It was an application to the local college using the degree completion program sponsored by the Army. The colonel and the CSM had arranged my schedule so I could attend classes and even held me over six months after my scheduled transfer date so I could complete my degree. Once that was in hand, they'd handed me the application packet for Officer Candidate School and stood over me until I'd completed it. With their strong recommendations, I was accepted and commissioned a second lieutenant upon completing the OCS program. Years later, on one of my stateside tours, I'd gotten an MBA from the local university. It had taught me a great deal about budgeting and managing projects, which I'd applied to my commands and staff positions.
General Diversity was right about my being a teetotaler. I'd not developed the taste for alcohol as a young man and continued to avoid it as I'd grown older. That part of my hard-shell Baptist raising had stuck with me.
As for celibacy, although not even Bob knew it, I was far from celibate, but I was extremely discreet. Meemaw and Pawpaw had failed in that regard. My dates tended to be with locals whom I met through the outdoors clubs I joined. There were any number of young and not so young single women who were enamored of the outdoors and delighted to have a fit male companion with similar interests, even if his accent could be cut with a meat cleaver. Most of them leaned very liberal, which was not a good mix with an infantry unit's officer corps, although it did seem to reduce any reluctance to engage in robust sexual congress. So I'd kept the two portions of my life separate. Few of my backpacking trips had been solo, Bob's and the general's understandings to the contrary notwithstanding.
Bob also didn't know that I'd been engaged once and married once. The engagement had been to another 2LT shortly after I was commissioned. Named Cassia Van Buren, she'd come from an old Dutch Hudson River family. Her ancestors had arrived in the new world in the early 17
